Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

the claim is from a woman who got upset over their use of "meritocracy", because judging on merit alone is wrong. you should give bonus points for race, gender identity, and financial background.

seriously, the only problem I saw was the not-employed-by-the-company wife thinking she was in charge when the CEO wasn't around. I have worked for a few small businesses where it's like that. the wife/mom just walks in and starts bossing people around, sometimes even using employees to do personal errands.

Are you implying that the term itself has no meaning, because I can promise you that it does. Perhaps you are rejecting the notion of meritocracy instead? Well then you're just an idiot and should go complain about it on Tumblr. Or maybe you are claiming that Silicon Valley is not a meritocracy, in which case your comment is pointless, because the actual state of reality does not mean that something cannot be striven for.

The term itself has a dictionary meaning, but in a practical sense it's one of the lies that startups and HR departments tell themselves about themselves and their employees (like "we're passionate about changing how payments are processed" or "we only hire rockstar ninjas") to avoid dealing with difficult real world concerns.

I have no problem with the concept as an ideal, but as with many other practical lies, it's as often used as a bludgeon, as a way to dismiss external factors, and as a means of post fa

That's not why she objected to the word at all, don't try to twist her words. She objected to a sign proclaiming Github to be a meritocracy because it isn't, and saying it is just denies that there is even a problem.

As far as I can tell, she objected to github claiming to be a meritocracy because other feminists would bully her and other females at github about it and wouldn't let them be in their clubs. Which seems fairly on par for that specific social context. We all have our cultural norms to conform to.

And the problem with meritocracy isn't that it isn't a meritocracy, the problem is that people who have fewer advantages have less opportunity to prove their merit or to reach their capacity (even besides all forms

Male Slashdotters -- think of how you'd feel, if somebody powerful was sexually harassing your wife, (I know, alien concept for many Slashdotters, but bear with me), mother or sister, and could leverage that power to do what they like with impunity. Not a good feeling now, is it?

Criminal, bullying, and anti-social behaviour should always be caught out and punished. It's good to see somebody being made an example out of.

I mostly agree with you, on this occasion. Except one detail: this founder nor his wife were part of the harassment accusations. I suppose it's just a bit unfortunate, if understandable, that the victim combined all her grievances in a single blog post. But the sexual harassment bit was about someone else. So an example has not been made actually, because that guy was apparently promoted!

The fact that the founder left Github tells me he and/or his wife did, in fact, harass Horvath. He was likely told by the legal department that he doesn't have a leg to stand on if shit hit the fan, and if I was Horvath I would be seriously considering suing. TFA says the investigator found no signs of legal wrongdoing, but I wouldn't be surprised if the investigator was blowing smoke. The fact that the founder's not receiving a more severe punishment is a big problem to me.

Lawyers aren't just to argue in court, they also are there to tell you when a case is going to cost you huge amounts of money, and investors really hate that, and advise you which of those battles need to be fought. The only thing his `resignation' says is that he wasn't valuable enough to fight for.

Except that, we have no idea what happened. The problem with harassment is that it's a he said/she said thing. There is one allegation, from one person and we have no idea about either persons integrity. He quit but it may very well just been out of disgust. Or maybe they were having an affair and it got out of hand. We have no idea. Judging either of them based on no other evidence than what they've both said would be wrong. If there were more allegations, if the guy hadn't been working there for years without incident, I might have another opinion. Yes, men do say things to women they shouldn't. But there are also plenty of women out there that will use harassment as a revenge tactic against men they dislike. I have no idea which happened here, so I reserve judgement until there is more evidence.

Except that, we have no idea what happened. The problem with harassment is that it's a he said/she said thing. There is one allegation, from one person and we have no idea about either persons integrity. He quit but it may very well just been out of disgust. Or maybe they were having an affair and it got out of hand. We have no idea. Judging either of them based on no other evidence than what they've both said would be wrong. If there were more allegations, if the guy hadn't been working there for years without incident, I might have another opinion. Yes, men do say things to women they shouldn't. But there are also plenty of women out there that will use harassment as a revenge tactic against men they dislike. I have no idea which happened here, so I reserve judgement until there is more evidence.

Some of the claims made can be independently reviewed (not by us, but by someone with access to). Like how blatantly Fatal Attraction-driven the code rejects where, or if they actually made sense. Go through a number of them and you can quickly spot a bad pattern if there is a bad pattern. Also with some of the communication around all of this. And the company/founder lawyers probably already have a good idea of the outcome of such a review.

Except that, we have no idea what happened. The problem with harassment is that it's a he said/she said thing.

The real problem is that, aside from a few well publicized situations, women invariably do NOT speak out about legitimate sexual harassment. It is much easier to a person's psyche to keep your head low and just try to avoid the perpetrator, keep your mouth shut, and pretend it's not going on. Coming out in the public with the situation leads to hate threats and doubts about your employability. Supposing that the man might be the victim goes against occam's razor. Unless you are personally involved, then

The ironic part of your argument is that, to accept it, you have to generalize your opinion of both men and women. You need to accept the stereotypes you've put forth. Which is exactly the kind of thing harassment is about. I deal in facts, not generalizations. Accusations require proof, not guesses based on the history of your side of the gender gap.

Harassment claims are not always he said/she said things - that is a pretty gross generalization. In this case there were plenty of witnesses, as well as admissions (direct and tacit) from the company itself!

Why make your point with an attack on Slashdotters? What value did that add?

Also what makes you so informed in the details of this situation that you can say he's being made an example of fairly? From the information on the web, this infantile woman can't get along with anybody in the workplace, and cried wolf. What about the investigation which basially came up with nothing? What about all the details in her story that were left out and revealed elsewhere?

It is 2014. In the year 2014, we all know that sexual harassment charges are often wildly overblown and nothing but a weapon of revenge. Remember Donglegate?

I love your witch hunt mentality. The guilty ones are out there somewhere, and if we tag a few innocents along the way, that's OK because nobody is innocent. They're all guilty of being men, all men are rapists, and go ahead and throw in race somewhere as well.

I'll give you that the sexual harassment label is over-applied. But to leap from that to "nothing but a weapon of revenge", i.e. that no sexual harassment charge ever has any merit, is leaping quite a bit too far.

It sounds like you only read the summary. If you had taken the time to actually gather the facts about this situation you'd realize it wasn't even a case of sexual harassment. It was a case of an employee being more concerned with a crusade of political correctness than actually doing her job. Women like Julie Ann Horvath who intentionally antagonize those who aren't perfectly politically correct (and in this case, her idea of perfectly politically correct is one helluva stretch -- if you think the word 'me

I didn't realize that complaining about your commits being vengefully reverted by the guy you wouldn't fuck, was antagonizing, and demanding of an unreasonable level of political correctness. So sorry!

This this has gone insane. Now everybody is subject to a "Harassment" claim on whatever the person afected feels. This will turn into idiotic work environment, cut cummunication between workers, and send the organization into a bureaucratic nightmare, to finally kill it.

and her future job prospects. I understand that she was wronged but I think social media is the wrong way to go about resolving the problem. Reading her twitter comments made me cringe. The Internet doesn't exactly let you take comments back. I'm saying she is in the wrong at all but damn.

Has anyone stopped to consider that maybe one of the reason tech workers get a bad rap is because of little kids like this? When people are put in charge of an environment like this, and they don't have the self-control to handle themselves, no one will grow up and every non-techie will point out the out of control nerd farm.

One of the things that does bother me about our chosen profession is the...lack of professionalism. I'm not saying everyone has to live in a PC world with no expression of opinion, etc. But, you would think that by one's 20s (and beyond in some cases!) one would have enough self-control to realize what sexual harassment is. I'm sure there are all sorts of mitigating circumstances that will be cited, etc. but I've just never had the urge to harass female colleagues. Usually, I'm too busy doing work at work to even think about it. I'm a guy, and I probably wouldn't want to work somewhere like GitHub, or be a Linux kernel developer, etc. In my opinion, it's not unreasonable to say that an office shouldn't be run like a strip club. I see a lot of posts accusing people of being overly PC and how they should be allowed to harass whoever they want without restrictions. I'm betting that most people are referring to the "sexual harassment training" that HR in large organizations has to give. It's silly, yes. But you know why we have it? Because some people are morons when it comes to personal behaviour.

I would be all for the IEEE, ACM or some other organization lobbying for all software and systems engineers to be lumped into the main body of the engineering profession. People could be licensed and responsible for their work, there would at least be a code of ethics on paper, etc. And, training would be formalized so that people would at least have a grounding in the fundamentals. PEs have to at least pass an exam that demonstrates they were paying attention in their college classes.

This is not really an issue across the entire software industry, but rather a particular subset: the Silicon Valley (and sometimes New York City) startup run by people in their 20s who think they are going to reshape the software industry (if not the entire world.) Bad attitudes also persist into video game development studios, though the environments are perhaps not as bad. I'm sure it varies a lot from place to place.

Larger and more mature software organizations are by nature far more risk-averse, so they

Good points all, but I would one thing to your diagnosis that this is particularly bad in Silicon Valley: when you create a culture that celebrates "disruption" and sees rule-breaking as entrepeneurialism, you're almost certain to have a much harder time living within social boundaries that are the result of a lot of hard-earned lessons.

Rules can be profitably broken, but doing so tends to require understanding those rules in the first place and figuring out why some particular point is no longer worth obey

I'm sure there are all sorts of mitigating circumstances that will be cited, etc. but I've just never had the urge to harass female colleagues. Usually, I'm too busy doing work at work to even think about it.

Me neither, but I also would like to add that I haven't exactly had a lot of opportunities to harass female colleagues. For instance, where I'm currently employed, there's only two female "colleagues" I could harass if I wanted to. One is the office secretary (who isn't much to look at), who I almost

I kinda wonder if some men in this profession, growing up with almost no women around in school and later in work, develop poor attitudes about women largely because there just aren't any around.

I think that's part of it, though I'd be hesitant to paint everyone with the stereotypical "mom's basement" brush. I've met some people like this, and they really live up to the stereotype, but this is becoming less and less of a reality these days. Feel free to provide counterexamples.:-)

Disney has done a horrible amount of damage to society, I think, with its ridiculous portrayals of relationships and courtship and what peoples' expectations should be.

I had some bad experiences in college too, with dating, since all I had as a guide was Hollywood movies and TV. (I was raised by a single mother who never dated.) I wised up pretty quickly and learned how not to be a creep, but it sure took a long time to actually get from there to having any successful relationships.

I really, really don't think we need PE-style licensing professionalism for most software. Example: Facebook lets anybody commit code that goes straight to the public site. I guess you're probably supposed to test it before you hit commit and it immediately goes live. Is this an issue? Does Facebook crash often? Does it even matter?

In the situations where good software is really, really important -- like, say, airplanes -- we already have regulations in place to deal

Translation of GitHub's weasel words: "Our lawyers told us not to admit to anything or we could be liable in a lawsuit. The company we hired to tell us we aren't liable in a lawsuit told us we aren't liable in a lawsuit."

Maybe Horvath isn't entirely in the right here but it is clear that the co-founder must have intimidated her as she claimed and/or let his wife (a non-employee) run amok. GitHub even admitted as much when the original story broke and re-banned his wife from the building. GitHub's legaleze non-statement doesn't address this at all.

The anonymous medium post is being given far more credence than it deserves because it fits the narrative people want to have about the story. Just be honest... You want the truth to be that Horvath somehow did wrong and brought this on herself because the alternative is that a fun cool company that has good technology also did a bad thing.

Let us not forget that Horvath did not bring any of this up in the first place - she simply quit. It was an anonymous person (that was suspected of being the founder's wife at the time) who posted about it, thus eliciting a reply from Horvath.

Again, according to Horvath, the supposed "investigators" never bothered to contact her until a day or two before wrapping up the "investigation". It seems very clear GitHub hired them to obtain a foregone conclusion.

I don't see how any of this is shocking. It is 100% believable (and by Occam's razor probably true) that the founder's wife was allowed to run around like she owned the place, got into a conflict with Horvath, then when it blew up Preston-Werner jumped to his wife's defense (understandable) without thinking about the implications of allowing your non-employee relative to even put you in that kind of situation to begin with; he certainly didn't consider what it would be like for an employee to be cornered by a co-founder over it. Then when it became public, they called the lawyers, circled the wagons, etc. I also would be shocked if some of the anonymous stories are by GitHubbers who are just repeating internal rumors and rising to defend the company they like, without any actual direct knowledge of what happened.

I'm assuming that there will be no active investigation of GitHub unless Horvath files a lawsuit. To me, I'm curious about the liability of the company because of TPW's wife's actions (IF TRUE). From [techcrunch.com]:

"She says that the wife of the founder continued to show up at the office, sit next to her and “glare” at her for extended periods of time “as if trying to provoke a reaction.”

and...

"HR eventually asked the wife to not be on the same floor as Horvath. But according to Horvath’s

and airing out personal and professional problems to the world, is the allowance of mob justice. Even though they found no wrongdoing or harassment after a legitimate investigation, it didn't matter; Preston and his wife had already undergone trial by media.

From the previous article where Horvath aired out her grievances with the company, I was disappointed to realize accusations of company-wide sexual harassment were misleading and that 95% of her problems were with Preston's wife. I don't know why that was a problem that needed to be dealt with publicly. It was dramatic.

You're probably right that in general such phrases have been subject to so much inflation so as to be almost meaningless by now.

In this specific case though, Ms Horvath claimed that a male co-worker showed up at her house with romantic ideas. And that he subsequently reverted some of her patches, presumably because she didn't go along. I think that qualifies as sexual harassment, even in the pre-inflation sense of the word?

Incidentally, some of the press reports have been getting it wrong; the harassment accusations were NOT about this founder, or his wife, but another guy at GH (who has apparently been promoted since).

No. Just calling a spade a spade. What explanation can there be to mention that the "other guy" is/was the "ex-boyfriend" as a counter-argument? What relevant information does that elucidate? What is the point?

Passive-aggressively demonizing other people like that is as immature as it gets online,

Not as much as mentioning that the "other guy", the harasser, was "the ex-boyfriend" as if that explained things, without context with which to interpret that precious pearl of information.

short of doxxing to incite harassment.

If you say so, it must be so. See, if the shoe fits, wear it or see a podiatrist (or in this case, psychiatrist.)

"ex boyfriend" is relevant in this context. She's claiming she was bullied by a coworker at GitHub. If fact she's having relationship issues with an ex-boyfriend who also also worked at GitHub, and has caused additional problems for herself by dating the friend of a GitHub manager and getting into a pissing contest with the manager's wife over that relationship.

That said, GitHub management should have sat everyone down and told them to act like adults or find somewhere else to work, her included.

The source of the "ex boyfriend" claim is an anonymous blog post with no sourcing or corroboration, and it's a detail that was completely missing until now, despite plentiful opportunities to introduce it. Since claimed, no one has confirmed it. A troll is throwing up sand.

If you mean "the official story from the people hired by github to investigate github's wrongdoing, who found that their employer github did nothing wrong, but for totally unrelated reasons one of our founders is going to spend more time with his other interests," then I agree.

Just thought I'd update this now that more details have been revealed. Horvath was dating someone at github, who at the time much of this happened was an ex; however, he's not the bully; Ted Nyman is the guy who vengefully reverted her commits after she refused to get involved with him--that's a classic pattern of sexual harassment. She never dated Nyman.

Subsequently revealed emails and texts show that TPW and his wife were pretty much as bad as alleged, and that various upper-ups at github worked with th

Every story has two sides and for several weeks now Julie Ann Horvath has decided to share only the details of her side of her experiences at GitHub and the circumstances around her departure.

A few of us, those who knew Julie and the events that occurred, have decided that if Julie wants to share this story so publicly then everyone should at least have all of the story.

Here are some details that may help explain this story a little differently.

The EngineerJulie calls out an engineer in her story. The engineer she alleges harassed her was in fact an ex-boyfriend that she was still friends with at the time, not a random coworker she barely knew. They had dated prior to working at GitHub and were on good terms at the time.

The project he “ripped out” code from was a small css refactoring on an internal side project that he was helping her with. At the time of the incident, she was not upset about it and it was quickly fixed. At the time of her departure, she was not on great terms with him and her public story changed.

The Cofounder and His WifeAround the end of 2012, Julie started dating a close male friend of the cofounder’s wife and didn’t like that they were close. She asked them to stop being friends and when they would not end their relationship, Julie started telling coworkers that the wife had affairs and that the cofounder’s newborn child was not his. She told this to multiple coworkers directly and also to the wife through her boyfriend.

This is where the wife reached out to her and the rest of her story starts. All of Julie’s story involving the cofounder’s wife occurs only after Julie was spreading vicious rumors about him to even new employees.

Three months later, the first Passion Projects talk was held at GitHub. It’s difficult to know if this was a concession by the cofounder for her to stop threatening his family and undermining him to his employees, or perhaps just a way for him to try to get on her good side so she would not want to hurt his family.

We share this because reading through the TechCrunch article with this in mind changes the story for us. It seems less like a story of gender issues and more like a story of the problems that arise when employees date coworkers and cannot separate work and personal life.

We dislike that she is taking advantage of people’s trust in her in order to craft a message for which she wants to be the symbol. Good people are suffering for a story she knows is not fully true and she does not seem to care.

It's interesting reading the opposite side of this story. However, this has pretty low credibility to me. We're dealing with one story which is being publicly told by an individual who is putting her name out there, and standing behind her words. This rebuttal consists of a few loose allegations with no facts to back them up, posted by a generic anonymous coward. It reads more like office gossip than a factual rebuttal.

However, I have a few thoughts on it.

- It's insinuated that Julie is being deceitful by hiding the fact that the engineer is an ex-boyfriend. If it is, in fact, true that it was an ex-boyfriend, it's equally reasonable that Julie excluded that part of the story from her public side of the tale in order to protect his identity and not publicly call him out. Keep in mind Julie didn't even mention the founder or his wife by name.

- It's insinuated that the engineer's advances were "OK" because he was an "ex". This is simply false. Just because you had a relationship with someone doesn't make it OK to harass you.

- It's insinuated that Julie didn't have any issues with the retaliation that the engineer used against her. However if you read Julie's story, she obviously did. She may just not have come forward about it immediately, which is what happens in MANY cases of retaliation and harassment. It's easier and more comfortable to deal with the issue on your own, hope it blows over by itself, etc.

- The back-and-forth regarding the wife just sounds like meaningless he-said she-said. I'll believe it if the wife comes forward publicly and says something about it, but this just sounds like 3rd person rumor mongering to me.

- The insinuation that the "Passion Projects" at GitHub was somehow a bribe to get Julie to stop "threatening" the founder's family is a pretty serious allegation to make without any factual information to back it up, and posted anonymously.

It's insinuated that Julie is being deceitful by hiding the fact that the engineer is an ex-boyfriend. If it is, in fact, true that it was an ex-boyfriend, it's equally reasonable that Julie excluded that part of the story from her public side of the tale in order to protect his identity and not publicly call him out. Keep in mind Julie didn't even mention the founder or his wife by name.

You're bending over backwards here. If it is true it was an ex-boyfriend, that completely changes the dynamic of the story and it was deceptive of her to leave it out. She didn't name the founder, but offered plenty of details. It's beyond belief that she was merely trying to protect the engineer's identity by omitting such a salient detail (again, if it is true).

Given the "meritocracy" rug crap, her mention of the hula hoop incident, and her feminist "Passion Projects" activism at the company, I'm not incl

We're dealing with one story which is being publicly told by an individual who is putting her name out there..

And just trying to publicly shame people and force a unfair trail by media. Nothing is credible about how she has approached this. You don't scream from the tree tops. You get a lawyer and deal with it in a professional way.

The original accusation has a human being who's come forward and publicly attached her name and career prospects to it, and is accepting significant personal costs to do so. The anonymous blog post is 100% consequence free for the author. That does imply a relative difference in credibility.

The time cube guy has nothing to lose by being time cube guy. Horvath's prospects in the startup world are in a shambles now, and she's faced a volume of shit that crazy people like time cube guy don't care about because they're crazy, but is a huge disincentive to normal people. It's not proof, but it's a point in her favour.

You don't have to accept anything as the "truth" without supporting evidence either way, or is reasoned thinking beyond people these days? An accusation has been made, and now counter claims are coming out. No evidence either way, so its a PR exercise for all parties involved.

And someone else can testify "nuh-unh!"; and without proof either way, you are right back to square one. This is why there is a thing called "burden of proof". The prosecution is the one that needs to prove it with evidence.

It would depend on the structure of the organization/project. But yes, most private corporate projects are not similar to Wikipedia in that way (but all additions have the possibility to include bugs that make revisions simply the best thing to do).

But that is what makes it such a simple situation. You have the original code, you have her changes, and you know what revisions/additions the accused did. Have a third party scan the changes, than ask the accused employee to justify his revisions. It would take

Is it really "misogynous" (sic) to point out that sexual harassment charges are frequently abused? I don't know what's more troubling, the fact that this happens, or the fact that those who speak out about it are silenced.

I think everybody's all for more women in the work place, and even tweaking some things to make it a more inviting place (but I'd fall short of "catering to" since I don't like discrimination). Stuff like improved parental (both parents) leave, more flexible hours, better work-life balance, etc that helps everybody, but women tend to value more highly and so it disproportionately keeps them away.

Let's say you're an employer with a mostly-male (at least in a particular section) workforce and you want to impr

This would all be a much more meaningful comment if it were 80 years ago and we were debating allowing women into the workplace at all. Outside of the tech industry--in medicine, law, business, factory work--women make up a substantial, if not equal, portion of the workforce, and the employers have figured out how to handle men and women working together. You have an express policy forbidding harassment, an HR department that responds properly to accusations, and bam! You're in the clear. For employers

Say what you will, but the AC is correct about this being a risk that vanishes in an all-male workforce.

The risk doesn't vanish. It simply gets masked, just as one would mask if we have an all Caucasian (or X=whatever ethnic label of your choosing) workforce where racial problems vanish all of the sudden.

Where I work, several of my colleagues are openly gay and simple statistics suggest that some are gay but not open about it.

There are zero issues. You are wrong.

Yeah, because your personal anecdotal evidence is representative of working conditions everywhere. Good that your place of work is not filled with homophobic assholes, but for that piece of anecdotal evidence, I can enumerate half a dozen I've personally witnessed where gay people have been subjected to a hostile environment.

It also means fostering an environment where juvenile-minded males never grow up into reasonable, professional men, fostering a culture that eventually and surely will spawn a molester or sociopath.

And this doesn't just apply to the business world. You get similar issues in professional team sports, where guys come out of school/college straight into what is essentially a never-ending frat house environment.

Basically, in this case, it likely means that he was fucking some underling. Consensual or not, that's a liability nightmare. At any point, said underling could become pissed and sue, saying she/he was pressured into banging the boss by the fact that he was her/his boss. So the company isn't thinking "harassment" in terms of a criminal act. They're likely thinking more in terms of civil liability.

The term "Sexual Harassment", - with the word "Sex" followed by another word "Harass", - sounds awfully serious.

But, like all other liberal creation (social welfare, for example) "Sexual Harassment" itself has been abused.

Fortunately no conservative constructs have ever been abused... couldn't resist - back to the topic

Nowadays you can be slapped with a "Sexual Harassment" lawsuit if you comment on the way someone dress herself or "itself".

In some cases, it was much worse before. In the 1980's, at the place where I worked, we had our first gender harassment seminars.

It quickly turned surreal. Your example of how the woman dresses was spot-on. The gender harassment rep told us that it was very dangerous to compliment a woman regarding any physical matter. That telling her "Those earrings are nice" was okay, but saying you look great in those earrings was skirting the edges of harassment.

Then when a man asked what the definition of sexual harassment was, she said "Sexual harassment is whatever a woman says it is". You could have heard the proverbial pin drop.

This draconian interpretation started a years long mess, where the men actively avoided all the women. Male supervisors would not engage 1 on 1 with female staff - there would always be at least one other person. Men quit talking to or socializing with women.

And the women absolutely hated it. Some of the ladies I worked with were dirty minded and flirtacious enough to make me blush some times, and the men were avoiding them like the plague.

One of the machinists had a nice photo of a young lady in a cheerleader outfit on his toolbox. A woman took offense to it, and he was told to take it down. It was his daughter.
The pathetic part was this estrangement only alienated normal guys. The men who were actually harassing women still did all the same things, blocking doorways so the woman had to brush up against them, "accidentally" touching them in the places you might expect, they just kept on keepin' on.

Fortunately, calmer, more rational heads saw what had been created, and modified the rules. Instead of treating all men as rapists who just hadn't been caught yet, they focused on the guys - and women who were the real problem.

In the end, it did help, although a lot of the older guys were pretty set in their ways, and never did socilize much with the female staff.

In fact, I can be charged for "Sexual Harassment" right now, because of the term "itself" that I've used to describe people whom I do not know how to describe (they are not male, nor female).

I brought up the question one time, if a man avoids all contact with women in the workplace - except for the minimum to get work done - in order to not be accused of harassment, and the women know he avoids them because of that, is his avoidance sexual harassment?